This months early access review, as nominated by Patrons, is Pokemon Red. You can read this review right now!
I got your nomination for an early access review and, this month, you picked Pokemon Red.
This review had an interesting backstory for me that is, well, not typical for your average Pokemon player. When these games were first released, there was a significant amount of branding and advertising involved. One such effort was the cartoon series. When this went on the air, I watched a few episodes of the series to find out what the heck the hub-bub was all about.
All I can say that the cartoon series was very effective at souring my taste for the franchise. I didn’t think it was all that great and hearing people gushing over the franchise suggested to my younger mind that people have gone insane. I put it in the same category of the also cringe-worthy cartoon series, Sailor Moon (I heard later that it was probably the dubbing that ruined it for North American audiences more than anything else). At the time, I was much more interested in the Reboot series, Beast Wars, and even some old reruns of Spider-Man at the time. I had zero interest in playing the game because of the cartoon series.
So, fast forward all these years later, I knew that in the process of keeping an open mind about as many different games as humanly possible, I had to play the Pokemon game. What’s more, it made the most sense is to at least start with the original Game Boy games so I could get a better understanding of how the franchise evolved over time.
Getting this game, I gave a heavy sigh and thought, “OK, let’s get this over with”. Everything about that moment told me that I could just play the game, fail it, and move on to more interesting games afterwards. Well, that open-mindedness about games ended up working out very well for this game. The game itself wound up being a heck of a lot better than I was expecting. No headache inducing “life lessons” being jammed into things, no painful to watch musical numbers (yes, I think it would’ve been possible to program something like that into a Game Boy game), none of that. Just interesting strategy throughout the game with a decent progression throughout.
While I wouldn’t call it a perfect game by any means, I ended up liking it. Not the outcome I was anticipating when I first started it up, but the outcome I ultimately got. I even went on to play a couple of other generations in the Pokemon franchise.
So, this is the review from someone who had zero expectations this was even going to be a good game in the first place.
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